by Lisa Gornick
She reads slowly and loudly. While she can imagine Saul being riveted by the words, she reads with little attention to what she’s saying until the passage on mutual aid pulls her back into focus. “‘Consider, for example,’” she reads, “‘the duty of mutual aid. Kant suggests, and others have followed him here, that the ground for proposing this duty is that situations may arise in which we will need the help of others, and not to acknowledge this principle is to deprive ourselves of their assistance.’”
Santiago nods vigorously.
“‘But this is not the only argument for the duty of mutual aid,’” Rena continues, “‘or even the most important one. A sufficient ground for adopting this duty is its pervasive effect on the quality of everyday life. The public knowledge that we are living in a society in which we can depend upon others to come to our assistance in difficult circumstances is itself of great value.’”
“These are the most important sentences in the book,” Santiago says. “Here, in your country, self-sufficiency is idealized. Receiving help, people think it is demeaning. After Bernardo disappeared, people became embarrassed around us. They pitied us because we needed so much help to continue our search.”
“But what if a person refuses help?” She is thinking of Saul, how he’d never told her about the pills.
Santiago takes so long to respond, she wonders if he has not heard her. Or is he thinking that if Saul rejected her help, it was never truly offered?
He clears his throat, lifts his chin. “In a capitalist society, money becomes the metaphor for everything. People believe that help is a limited resource, that they’ve spent their ration. They don’t understand that love is like air. We can take as much as we need.”
ON HER THIRD VISIT to Santiago, she tells him she’s been apartment hunting, looking, in fact, for something here on Riverside Drive.
“But my neighbors just told me they are moving! Of course, I have not seen the apartment in years, but it has the same view as mine. Before they moved in, my daughter and her husband were going to take it, but then they moved to Saudi Arabia.”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“By my first marriage. Flora’s mother died in the childbirth, so she was raised by her mother’s mother, a good woman but very cold to me. She blamed me for her daughter’s death. Then she blamed me when Flora eloped at fifteen with an older cousin.”
Behind Santiago, the river shimmies in the wind. “A disaster. He was a philanderer and a gambler. My daughter followed him to Caracas, where he lost both of their allowances. It took her grandmother three years to get the marriage annulled.”
“She’s remarried now?”
“The year Bernardo disappeared.”
Santiago leans forward on his white-tipped cane. With the mention of his son, the room fills with silence. Rena places the Rawls on the coffee table. She forces herself to ask. “What happened—with your son?”
“If only I could answer that question. He’d gone with his tape recorder to visit a man who lived about three kilometers outside the town. He must have been kidnapped on the way. That’s all we really know.”
Only Santiago’s lips move—movements so small it seems no voice could emerge. “We took out ads in the newspapers saying we would pay fifty thousand dollars American to anyone who could return our son or lead us to him. I did not say this to my Helen, but I knew when we had no response, we would not find him.”
Santiago lowers his head. His shoulders heave and the cane wobbles. Rena raises herself from her chair, goes to sit at his side. She wonders if Santiago was like this with Saul: his grief infiltrating everything. She places a hand on his back, so thin she can feel his spine.
He takes a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. “No one would tell me who killed my son. The army, someone paid by the local police …”
It is the first time he has used that word: killed.
“It used to matter to me who it was. Now—it doesn’t seem to matter.”
“You’re certain he was killed?”
“For many years, I thought there was a chance he was in prison. Sometimes, at night, I would imagine it was like one of those romance stories where the hero gets amnesia. That he’d been in an accident and lost his memory but was living in good health somewhere. Other times, I would imagine things much worse. The imagination is crueler than a torturer. Not seeing the body, I was left with no limit of possibilities. I am an atheist. But still, I have never been able to get over feeling that it is a break, a breach—is that the word, my English in these matters, it still fails me—not to bury your kin.”
Santiago wipes his dripping nose with the handkerchief and blows. “It is a basic law. We must consecrate our dead. It goes through all civilizations.”
His shoulders heave again. “That is the worst part for me. That I could not even bury my child.”
THE SUPER shows her the apartment. A kitchen with the original paned cabinets and room for a table. A small living room with a long hallway leading back to a bedroom and an enormous bath, both facing west so that she can see over the treetops to the river. In the bath, a clawfoot tub and a huge window filled after dark with the sparkling of the lights from the Jersey shoreline. She imagines a pale yellow kitchen with geraniums in the window, a bedroom all in white. She hesitates, wary of living next door to Santiago, afraid not that Santiago will in any real way intrude on her but that she will be unable to maintain a wall between her wishes and his, his sadness and hers. In the end, though, the apartment is too wonderful to pass up.
Ruth and Maggie volunteer to help paint. At first, it is going to be just the three of them, but then Leonard calls to say he can come that same morning to take Saul’s things and insists on staying to give a hand.
“It will be like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Leonard says over the phone. There’s an unfamiliar touch of joviality in his voice, as if painting her apartment will be the most congenial thing he’s done in months. “Where is it?”
“Actually, it’s in Santiago Domengo’s building.” She doesn’t say the apartment next door.
“I remember that building. There’s a marble bench in the lobby. Saul took me there once. Years ago, before Santiago’s wife died.”
After they hang up, she can’t shake an uneasy feeling—a reluctance to let Leonard see her, her empty walls, up close. The first time she met Leonard, she’d felt this same uneasiness. Seated in a Chinese restaurant on Columbus Avenue, dawdling over the last few Hunan shrimp and the remaining broccoli with garlic, Saul and Leonard had discussed biography and the nature of memory while Klara made a show of some kind of advancing malaise, a transparent display of displeasure at the déclassé restaurant and the quiet new girlfriend, pretty enough but dressed in clothes that looked like they came from a catalog.
What had set it off—this uneasy feeling—was a single sentence of Leonard’s. Our personal history begins with the memories of our grandparents. In her mind’s eye, she’d seen the photographs Saul had shown her of his grandparents: his maternal grandfather elegantly arranged in his Johns Hopkins office (a man with memories stretching back to his own grandparents and the china they brought from Edinburgh to the United States the year Andrew Jackson became president); Leonard’s mother, the perky little Rita who had left a village in the Ukraine in 1909, never again to see her babushka’d grandmother plucking chickens or her white-bearded grandfather bowed over a religious book.
Leonard, of course, had not known that Rena could remember only one of her grandparents, her mother’s father, who by then had lost his own memories, unable to recognize even his daughter, and that for the other three, she could not even imagine their memories. As though with Eleanor’s run to the west coast, a bag hastily packed for Rena and her, not a photograph, not a dish, not even a toy taken along, history had been leveled, a city brought to rubble, and it would take generations—Rena’s children’s children—before there would be relics again.
7 Leonard
I’ve no
t held a paintbrush since before I met your mother, when I lived in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and painted the walls sunflower yellow and cobalt blue thinking it would make me feel like I was in Provence rather than the basement of a cigar shop where you could hear the rats chasing each other between the walls. Not that I’d ever been in Provence, but I’d seen the paintings collected by the Cone sisters, Dr. Claribel and Etta, and had imagined myself belonging somewhere near the Mediterranean Sea: at one moment, an arid rust vista, at the next, ochre cliffs aglow with the pink of a setting sun. In Provence, I imagined Nature showing herself with full abandon, like a young girl with her lover—the peaches paler and softer, the olives almost navy in their delicious saltiness. Everywhere the hint of the sea: the anchovies in the bread, the white of fishbones. A more pleasing picture than the small dusty city in the Ukraine, the color of mud, where my mother, in fact, spent her first fourteen years—her first sight of the sea, the icy waves at Antwerp where she embarked for New York, everyone except herself (a stomach of iron, she proudly proclaimed) vomiting five, six times a day on the weeklong crossing.
I remember the envy I felt at your semester abroad, eight weeks of study in Aix-en-Provence and then a long, rambling journey. I followed your trip in my atlas as deduced from your postcards. You clung to the Mediterranean, traveling from Málaga to Naples, and then across Italy and the Adriatic Sea to Athens and on to Crete. I located Aghios Nikolais, where you wrote that you’d found a room in a house above the port.
I wished for you a little Cretan friend, a girl with black hair that touched her waist and brows like friendly caterpillars. A girl with a black mole on the inside of her thigh who pulled the sheets over her breasts only when she felt cold. I castigated myself for having given you my bookish legacy, that amalgam of too much seriousness and a passive reserve that made it likely your bed partners would remain the journal and paperbacks you carted around in your rucksack. So you can see why I was so surprised when you introduced us to Rena, not that she looks like the little Greek friend I wished for you, but rather that she has, despite her skittish veneer, an elusive but nonetheless undeniable beauty. Not the easy American cover-girl beauty that your brother saw in Susan but something more interesting that comes from the Old World, where things are not prized for being shiny and bright: long legs caught in the corner of an eye on a stone-laid street, thick hair pushed back from a face absorbed in thought, an aquiline nose suggesting an ancient hieroglyph.
I’m embarrassed, an old man, talking like this. It’s been too many years living with your mother, the celibacy a disease. Twenty-six years of it, since I was forty-one, since the spring her father died. The suburban house, our few vacations spent in wall-to-wall carpeted resorts with life-size sculptures of tennis pros perched on a weedless lawn. The body—something to be sanitized and controlled.
So why did you go along with it? I hear you asking. Why did you let her dictate everything?
What makes you think it was her?
MAGGIE, WHO TELLS ME she worked for two years in a feminist painters’ collective in Santa Fe, lays out the game plan: we’ll spend today covering the floors with drop cloths, taping the trim and prepping the walls. Our goal will be to roll one coat of primer and the first coat of paint. Tomorrow, we’ll do the second coat of paint and the trim.
Rena looks at me. “Don’t feel that you have to do this all weekend.” “Count me in, soup to nuts.” The words are still stiff in my mouth when I remember that tomorrow is Sunday, the day I visit you.
Isn’t that interesting, I imagine you saying. You forgot you were coming to see me.
Overdetermination doesn’t negate coincidence, I rejoin—but this is all fantasy because you have lost the energy for snappy remarks and it is apparent even to me that I forgot because I wanted to forget, because I am scared to see you in your current state of mind.
“I’ll take the boxes home tonight and come back tomorrow by noon.” Maggie divides us into work teams: Ruth and Rena, she and I. We begin the prep work on the bedroom. Maggie raises the blinds and it is stunning, the view of the river and park—the green treetops, the wide swatch of blue, the sailboats headed downstream, a tug and a barge moving north. I can see the spray from the prow of the barge and the gulls circling over the water, and for the first time I see that Rena is leaving you, that she is making a life on her own.
IT’S ELEVEN AT NIGHT by the time I haul your things up to the attic, your young man artifacts now stored in a space not much smaller than the five-by-eight cell you share with a twentyfour-year-old kid on his third mail fraud conviction.
I begin at six in the morning trying to call you at the pay phone on your floor. For the first hour there’s no answer, and then, starting at seven, the phone is ceaselessly busy. I leave a message for you at the warden’s office that I can’t come today, that I’ll be there Tuesday morning. The clerk answering the phone doesn’t want to take the message—“We’re not an answering service,” she says nastily, “we don’t take messages”—but I pull doctor’s rank (something I’ve always hated, the New Jersey cardiologists with their BMWs with the MD plates double-parked outside Le Cirque), saying this is Dr. Dubinsky, and she reluctantly agrees to have the message passed on to you. Afterwards, I feel miserable, and it’s hard to know how much is guilt for postponing my visit to you and how much is guilt that I’m posing as a physician—I who have not seen a patient in nearly four decades, unless you count your mother as a practice unto herself.
I spend the rest of the morning doing penance for leaving your mother untended for two afternoons in a row. I put chicken pieces in the oven for her dinner, take a croissant out of the freezer, go to the store for milk, fresh orange juice and a pint of her favorite black cherry chocolate-chip ice cream. At ten, I soft-boil her eggs and fetch the strawberry jam.
She stirs as I come in with her breakfast tray. “You’re early.”
“I need to leave in half an hour. I’m going to help Rena finish painting her apartment.”
She asks no questions about the new apartment. “I slept terribly. I feel so weak.” She stretches out weak over several seconds and then, as if forgetting the whole thing, swirls the strawberry jam into the yellows of her soft-boiled eggs. A fleck of croissant falls onto her neck and I reach over to wipe it off with the pink cloth napkin she likes on her tray.
She picks up the Sunday paper I’ve put by her side, reading as always the wedding announcements first.
“Deborah Gibbons. I wonder if that’s Edward Gibbons’ daughter.” I try to recall who Edward Gibbons is, but it is irrelevant since I am not expected to respond.
“She married the son of the president of one of the Sony divisions. He’s an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.” She laughs, a bitter laugh intended to imply how much richer and better everyone else is than us and ours. I feel terrible for you, that your mother has never been able to be proud of you, to view you as doing something important and worthy of respect. Not that she’d ever had any respect for psychiatry, but when we were first married she’d still held medicine in awe and this had extended in some feeble way to me. With her father’s death, the pedestal had cracked, as though if her father were no longer a doctor, there could be, at least in the way she’d always thought of them, no more doctors. She’d purse her lips when someone referred to doctors, once remarking to a neighbor, “Well, really, if you think about it, it’s very much like being a manicurist or an appliance repair person—just another service job.”
“Let me help you move to the armchair to finish your coffee. Then I can change the sheets.”
Obediently, she inches her legs over the side of the bed. Her ankles are swollen, her feet puffy on top. For twenty-some years, Stone has told us she will keep retaining water until she changes her diet and starts getting daily exercise.
“I used to have such lovely feet. So smooth and slender.”
“Yes, you did, dear.” I take her hand and guide her to the armchair.
“Amy Loodis,
she was my roommate my first year at Wellesley, she used to say she’d die three times over to have my feet. She had these awful size nine and a halfs.”
I put fresh sheets on the bed, plump up the pillows: everything done the way Mrs. Smiley used to do. With two college tuitions to pay, I’d had to let Mrs. Smiley go the year you began Swarthmore. Or rather, good soul that she is, she’d sensed the financial strain and found herself another position. “You can manage fine now, Dr. D, with a girl who comes in once a week to do your cleaning and laundry. That is, if you don’t mind doing the shopping and taking Mrs. D her trays.”
It took me a few days after you and Marc left for college to understand that the irritation I felt at both of you was resentment that you still needed me to keep the household running. I fought the idea; after all, you were eighteen and twenty, gone most of the year. But the bottom line was if I didn’t maintain a household, you had none. Different as my circumstances had been—there’d been no money for me to go away to college; I’d felt lucky that my mother had a steady job and could give me room and board and I could make enough to cover my City College tuition and incidentals by working summers for my uncle—my mother had always kept house with grace and good cheer. She’d never missed a beat, not after my father and Eunice died, not after Lil and Rose got married, not when it was just the two of us and me hardly ever home in the Pelham Parkway flat. Always, she stocked the icebox, cooked for the holidays, put the blankets in mothballs, vacuumed under the beds. (Merckin, my analyst until I quit my job and had no money to see him anymore, made a quizzical grunt when I described my mother this way, insinuating an unmetabolized oedipal complex. During the two years I lay five times a week on his couch, I argued with him about his spurious logic: if I hated my mother, it would be a defense against the incestual wishes; if I loved her, it was evidence thereof.) It frightened me that your well-being still depended so centrally on me.